I had a blast writing an article for one of my very favorite science magazines, New Scientist, about the future of virtual worlds. It was the third part in a series that focused mostly on SecondLife — I broke the mold with my article by arguing that SecondLife is not the future of the virtual. Instead, I think we’re headed towards a state of “augmented reality,” where we don’t plunge into cyberspace but instead bring elements of cyberspace out of the Web and into the real world.

Here’s an example. Five years from now, you might have a pair of Web-enabled glasses that provide a data-rich overlay on your environment, providing you with directions to the nearest bus shelter in the form of arrows that tell you when to turn — or they might offer instant translations of signs you’re looking at if you’re traveling in an area where you don’t read the language. Your real world experience will be virtualized or augmented by data from the Web. Sure there will be a place for immersive entertainment worlds like SecondLife or World of Warcraft in the future. But most of us will be busy turning the real world into a version of cyberspace.

Want to find out more, and hear what futurists and tinkerers like Amy Jo Kim, Mikel Maron, and Stewart Brand have to say about all this? You can read a PDF version of the article.

Popular Science has posted an article online that I wrote for their back-to-school issue about the nation’s five coolest university labs, including ones where you crash cars, create hurricanes, and walk on lava fields. Want to know more about what’s cool about going back to school? Read the article (and be sure to watch the amazing videos that the PopSci video team filmed — this one, taken at the Texas Tech Wind Lab, is my favorite).

So I killed two mice a few weeks ago, using an old-fashioned mouse trap. Some construction in the basement of my apartment building drove a whole colony of mice up into my walls, and they started running around my apartment, eating my rice and squeaking at all hours of the night and pooping everywhere. At first, I tried to negotiate with them. Really, they were cute and sort of awesome and I just wanted them to leave. I put all my rice in bins, threw out anything that might attract mice, and put out “humane traps.” But they ignored the humane traps, and continued to run around squeaking and zooming under my bed and pooping. They also ate the edges of a bunch of my books.

So I acted like the predator that I am, and put out deadly traps. Killed two mice the first night. After that, I didn’t have any more problems. I believed that I had finally conveyed a message that mice could understand: If you come into my house, I will kill you. It wasn’t a pretty thing, but it was effective. When I wrote about my mouse struggles, I got all kinds of hate mail. Was it the PETA joke I made? My ruthlessness? Read my column about killing mice, and find out more!

I was fascinated by a recent article in Science about Brak, a 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian city (now in Syria) whose structure seemed to defy conventional wisdom about how urban spaces evolved. Unlike many early cities, Brak did not start as a dense, central core and slowly radiate outward into neighborhoods. Instead, it began as a loosely-connected group of neighborhoods arranged in a semi-circle that gradually grew together and formed a centralized downtown area with temples and large ceramics shops.

Anthropologists investigating Brak speculate that its unusual evolution meant that its inhabitants may have been more tolerant of diversity, and less dependent on an authoritarian, centralized ruling class. This is certainly an appealing idea, since many social reformer types like myself are asking how we can improve the quality of life in urban spaces. Maybe a decentralized city model is more liberating? Less likely to result in slums and highrise palaces? Actually, I don’t think so. Read more about why I think a decentralized city model may not be as antiauthoritarian as it seems.

I’ve been traveling for several weeks, and have finally gotten home and back into the swing of doing things like, say, updating my personal blog. While I was away, I had a chance to go to a conference and meet up with a bunch of smartypants techie commentators like Adam Greenfield, Clay Shirky, Jan Chipchase, Ethan Zuckerman, Xiao Qiang, and Genevieve Bell. They all gave great papers, and it was one of those rare occasions where I felt like sitting in an air-conditioned room listening to people for 8 hours was as intellectually stimulating as reading a great book.

Greenfield made a comment that really stuck with me: He said that the United States used to be a country of neophiles, people in love with the new and (implicitly) the futuristic. Since the early 1970s, however, we have shied away from this tendency, finding comfort in the status quo or even in the past. Interestingly, Alvin Toffler’s wildly popular book Future Shock came out in the early 1970s, and it became such a massive, global bestseller precisely because it captured why people in the West were beginning to fear of newness and change.

Of course the 70s were also the era when the tools of our present-day social mutation got built: home PCs and the internet are both babies of the 70s. So obviously there is some neophilic impulse at work in the US today. But I still think Greenfield is right on some profound level, because the social reaction to Web culture today is so much more paranoid and unhappy than, say, the social reaction to Space-Age culture was in the 1950s. Certainly people in the 50s feared new technologies like the atomic bomb, but that’s quite different from fearing social networks like MySpace, or getting bent out of shape about blogs.

My question is, what could make people in the United States neophiles again? How can we relearn the love of change, the fearless embrace of what’s new, without becoming completely naive about the darker possibilities for biotech and ubiquitious computer networks?